The Conspiracy Against the Human Race Read Free Page B

might have read if he had gone the whole mile with it. They, our heads, then began turning traitor on us, dredging up enough why’s and what’s and how’s to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of bewilderment, threatening to crucify us with consciousness. This potentiality necessitated that certain defense mechanisms be exercised to keep us balanced on the knife-edge of vitality as a species. While consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution, it seems more lately to have become maladaptive, turning our self-awareness into a seditious agent working against us. As the Norwegian philosopher concluded, along with others before and after him, we must preclude consciousness for all we are worth from imposing upon us a too clear vision of the brute facts relevant to the “great matter of birth and death,” to borrow from the jargon of Zen Buddhism. We are the species that knows too much to content ourselves with merely surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into the 17

    paradoxical position of uselessly striving to be something other than what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on crumbling bones. (This fortuity is rather the best we can hope for, given the array of disasters that are superadded by consciousness to those for which we are naturally destined.) For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror, as per Zapffe, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.
    Perhaps it is precisely because On the Tragic is not globally accessible that “The Last Messiah” seems precious as a terse and limpid epitome of Zapffe’s thought. This short essay has no drawn-out and obfuscating elaborations, no detours into the kind of metaphysical song and dance that makes, for example, The World as Will and Representation (two volumes, 1819 and 1844) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer so wearing on those of us who have no head for such things. Zapffe’s thesis is crystalline, uncluttered by metaphysical gibberish and worked through to its ineluctably dismal conclusion. With minimal novelty of thought, “The Last Messiah”
    succinctly codifies ideas that, in view of the works of his philosophical predecessors, were already well covered. The real thrust of his message does not emanate from insights that are as astonishing as they are irrelevant to anyone who is not a career academic or is fooling himself about the consolations of philosophy. For Zapffe, as for all pessimists, insistence on what is commonplace but taboo is his stock in trade. The expression of outlawed truisms, however, is unfailingly obscured by philosophy’s arcane brain-twisters, which are supposed to “teach us how to think” as we amble toward the grave. Thinking and living are irreconcilable. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.
    The Norwegian’s two central propositions as adumbrated above are as follows. The first is that consciousness, that glory of awareness and self-awareness unique to our species, makes our lives miserable, and thus we thwart it in four principle ways: (1) by isolation of the dire facts of existence from our minds, denying both to ourselves and to others (in a conspiracy of silence) that our condition is inherently disconcerting and problematic; (2) by anchoring our lives in metaphysical and institutional “verities”—God, Country, Family, Laws—based on charters issued by an enforcing authority (in the same way as a hunting license), imbuing us with a sense of being official, authentic, and guarded while shunting aside the feeling that these documents are not worth the paper they are written on (in the same way as a passport establishes one’s identity even though it